Composite doors in Mullion Cove, installed professionally.

Mullion Cove's harbour walls were rebuilt after storm damage more than once in living memory, which tells you most of what you need to know about the exposure any door in this cove has to survive. This isn't a sheltered creek — it's a small, working harbour facing almost due west into the open Atlantic, and the cottages clustered around it take genuine storm-force gusts several times most winters. When we survey a property here, we're specifying for that reality, not for an average Cornish winter.

The properties immediately around the harbour are mostly older fishermen's cottages, low and thick-walled, built long before anyone thought about U-values but built very deliberately to survive weather. Up the hill in Mullion village itself, the housing is more mixed — Victorian terraces, some 20th-century infill, and newer bungalows on the outskirts toward Predannack — and the exposure drops noticeably the further you get from the cove itself.

For anything within direct line of the harbour, we go to our fullest specification without hesitation: A4 stainless steel fixings throughout, a drainable stainless-clad threshold, and a reinforced frame rated for higher wind loading than we'd use even a few miles inland. The multi-point lock is set to its tighter closure profile so the door seats hard against the frame in a storm rather than working loose over repeated gusts.

We also pay particular attention to glazing here. A large glazed panel looks lovely on a cottage with a harbour view, but it needs to be properly toughened and weather-sealed at the factory rather than site-glazed, because a poorly bedded unit is exactly the kind of weak point that a Mullion Cove storm will find. Every glazed composite door we fit here comes pre-glazed as a sealed unit built into the panel before it ever reaches the property.

Colour holds up differently here too — the salt-laden spray that comes off the harbour in a big sea genuinely reaches higher up a building than most people expect, and we've seen cheaper skins chalk and fade within a handful of years on properties directly facing the water. Our range is colour-guaranteed through the pigment being embedded in the GRP, not sprayed on top, which is the only way we'd trust a colour to survive this particular spot.

Move up into Mullion village itself and the specification, while still coastal-grade, doesn't need to be quite as aggressive. The village sits a little back from the cove and gets some shelter from the terrain, so while we still fit A4 fixings and a proper compression seal as standard, the very heaviest threshold detailing we'd use directly at the harbour isn't always necessary.

The housing mix here is genuinely varied — solid Victorian terraces along the main street, 1930s and post-war semis on the roads leading out toward Cury, and newer development on the fringes. Each gets templated individually, as always, but the village jobs tend to be more straightforward logistically than the cove itself, with easier parking and access for the van.

Along the coast toward Poldhu and Polurrian, much of the property is either standalone clifftop housing or converted apartments in what were once grander hotel buildings. These sit high and exposed, often with very little to break the wind at all, and we specify to the same level as the harbour cottages — sometimes higher, given how directly some of these properties face the prevailing weather with no cove or headland for any shelter whatsoever.

Where a property is one of several flats or apartments in a converted building, we also think about consistency — if neighbouring units have had doors fitted before, matching colour and hardware finish keeps the building looking coherent, and we'll flag that at survey if it's relevant rather than leaving it to chance.

Mullion Cove's harbour road is narrow, and parking for visitors in season can make it genuinely difficult to get a van close to some of the cottages. We schedule harbour jobs outside the busiest visitor hours where we can, and for properties right on the quay we sometimes hand-carry the final stretch of materials rather than trying to squeeze a van down to the door.

A typical install, cove or village, still completes in a single working day: removal, templating, frame fitting, slab hanging, hardware and weathering, and a full doorstep handover of the guarantee paperwork and cylinder security card. What differs at the harbour is the weather planning — we won't start a removal with a significant blow forecast within the working window, because leaving an aperture even briefly exposed at Mullion Cove in a gale is not something we're willing to risk.

We tell every Mullion Cove customer the same thing: a composite door needs almost no maintenance, but 'almost none' isn't 'literally none' at this exposure. A rinse of salt spray off the door face and hardware every few months, particularly after a big winter sea, keeps the finish looking as good as day one and stops salt crystallising in the hinge and lock mechanisms. It's a five-minute job, not a chore, but it's worth doing here specifically because the salt load is genuinely higher than almost anywhere else we work.

The 10-year guarantee covers the door regardless, but a little care extends the practical life of the hardware and finish well beyond that. We'll talk through this at handover rather than leaving it as a line in the paperwork nobody reads.

Insurers covering harbourside and clifftop property increasingly ask for PAS24 certification and a 3-star anti-snap cylinder as a condition of cover, and every composite door we fit around Mullion Cove meets both as standard. We hand over full spec documentation and a cylinder security card at completion, which is worth filing alongside your buildings insurance policy, particularly if the property changes hands or gets re-quoted for cover in future.

Our 10-year guarantee applies in full here, and we're confident in it precisely because the specification is built for Mullion Cove's actual conditions rather than a generic coastal average. If you're weighing up whether the fuller marine spec is worth the modest extra cost over a standard coastal doorset, our honest view — based on what we've seen fail early elsewhere on this stretch of coast — is that it very much is.